The Russian war memorial—not the slightly unstable statue of a
soldier in the fiergarten, but the new one in Eastern Berlin—is a characteristic specimen of Soviet monumental art. It consists of an enormous sunken terrace (which may sink furthei, no proper foundations having been made) in the middle of a park, and is dominated by a mound in which 2,600 Russian*. dead are said to have been reinterred. The mound is surmounted by a shrine and the shrine by a gigantic statue of a Red Army soldier with a child on his left shoulder and a sword in his right hand. The sword is simply enormous, projecting downwards towards the beholder and producing the same sense of false perspective that you get from people's feet in a snapshot of a picnic party. Half-way down the terrace are two massive and at first sight unidentifiable erections built with blocks of red marble from Hitler's Chancellory. They reminded me of a Monument to Democracy which stands in one of the principal streets of Bangkok, and which looks like an enormous human tooth with a very bad cavity in it ; but I soon saw that they are a sort of cubist trophy of arms, consisting of two lapidary red flags dipped in salute. On stone plinths the progress of Russia's war against Fascism (not against Germany) is depicted in bas relief, the problem of how to sculpt an explosion being boldly and frequently tackled ; the plinths are inscribed with extracts from Stalin's speeches. The effect of the whole thing is
perhaps best described as curious rather than beautiful ; but the trees planted around it will one day look very fine.
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